Content Strategies: Element 8, Brand voice, tone and langauge

What is your brand voice?

Everyday, potential clients ask the question "what do we write?" They often talk about previous content strategy being based on creating lower level pages or blog pages, where the subject matter has been left to an unknown writer working at an SEO agency, who is neither familiar with the client's business nor its products or services.

RIGHT FOR YOUR USERS and all else will follow

Our tone of voice and brand language experts tell a better story.

The result is that instead of websites generating additional content and interest by attracting low hanging fruit keywords, also defined as long tail keywords the website actually falls in Google's rankings.

This is because using the analogy of a rowing boat, for every new blog post the company's core product or service keywords are diluted with poorly structured content which is incorrectly positioned within the website.

One of the most important parts of any content strategy is to agree the tone and 'word' format of all content created; we help define your vision, mission & values

This can initially be gained by identifying the target market, are they men or women, are they young are they old? Two years ago Google employed over 1400 students to come in and take part in the study, that tried to look at websites and gauge their trustworthiness.

The result of this, as all the students were young and hip, a conversational style content was overly rewarded. Formal content and simply factual content was downgraded.

Are you talking to me?

Right for your business - Good content is user-centered, talking to not at.

With the tone approach agreed the next stage is to look at the actual use of words. What we do here is we look at the websites which currently rank in the top three positions for particular core keywords identified not only research.

What this means is we download these websites and then run the sites through software, to begin to count not only the appearance and number of words, but also how these words are correlated.

This would entail grouping words or key phrases. We also look at how these words are used in URLs can used in anchor text.

Comparison with competitors / client: clarity of message

We then compare our findings with our clients. What this often shows is that the clients use of language, think synonyms antonyms or substitutions is normally very narrow. What is currently happened in the past regardless of the size website is one team or one person has been responsible for writing most of that content.

This means that the content can only ever include their use of language and their way of describing things. Commonly content written by men is more attractive to men whereas content written by women is actually attracted to both sexes.

List of rules, substitutions and trust factors

With this information gleaned we then set about creating a list of rules where all keywords are assigned a list of substitutions. We also create a list of trust factor words that are available to the website is the rank in the top three positions, but might not appear on our clients work.

Although we ensure that all of these lists variations in such reasons in place it is a very loose fitting garment in the sense that we can't stifle creativity. The idea of any content strategy is to engage and to sell.

About VC

You might not read about VC in a blog, nor see us in a “best SEO list” website, we do not comment in forums, nor do we advertise.

This is because few SEOs are interested in facts or research; they often prefer myths and Google speak / PR to what they could discover for themselves. If they did a few weeks research many would see that many gospel SEO truths are in fact part truths and are mainly superfluous.

You may read quotes from VC in the Guardian, Times and on the BBC. We prefer the phone to email and if we do not think we can help you then we will say immediately.